Like others have said, I'm so sorry for your loss. My mother and I spent a period of caring for my aunt when she was pretty much 'shut-in' and my mother is not a cook. When shopping for her (and I'm modifying to make things a bit more 'home-cooked' than the stuff my mom bought), a typical list might look like this:

One or two roast chickens, cooked in two different ways (can be used to make chicken salad, or shredded with vegetables as well as eaten plain)

Lettuce (pre-prepared) with salad greens--put in a bowl, undressed, cover and leave it to be 'served' when needed.

Pasta salad, coleslaw, macaroni salad, potato salad, or shrimp salad--if you make it yourself, use slightly lower-fat mayo, or a more vinegar and mustard-based dressing to make it healthier.

Sliced cheese (either by yourself or bought pre-sliced from a deli). These can be used for sandwiches (grilled cheese) or melted on white potatoes.

Bag of white or sweet potatoes--can be microwaved or baked in the oven

Oatmeal--ideally steel-cut, but if your brother's cooking skills are really sub-par, you can get some plain instant stuff. Dried fruits, honey can spice it up and even make a quick dinner.

Cooked turkey breast--from deli or made by yourself.

Frozen, bagged vegetables in single-serve, or two-serving containers. Make yourself and pre-package, or buy in freezer section.

I've always loved maple oatmeal scones--given how yummy biscuits are with butter and honey or maple syrup, having the maple infused in the biscuit seems like one of those 'why didn't I think of that first' food concepts!

@hmw0029--how funny you said that! When I was playing around with the recipe, I first used a mix of chocolate, butterscotch, and peanut butter chips! However, I found the butterscotch a little bit too sweet with the Golden Grahams. But you could certainly give it a try--perhaps a mix of butterscotch chips with the darkest chocolate chip you can find might be yield a better result.

@Feedmillgirl--oh no! I wish they would make different nut butter chips! I don't have an allergy and I'd be 'all over' cashew butter chips!

The best suggestion I could offer would be to use 2 cups of chocolate chips. Then, after the bars have cooled, heat up 1/2 cup of almond butter and a tablespoon of honey (you made need more, given that almond butters vary greatly in consistency) and drizzle the mixture on the finished product in swirls.

You could try substituting almond butter for the peanut butter chips, but I haven't tried that--yet--so I can't officially say it will work.

During one food phase of my life, I ate quite a bit of Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, and Stouffer's French bread individual pizzas, all averaging around 350-450 a 'slice.'

For some reason, despite the fact I was reading a great deal of French deconstructionist philosophy, it never occurred to me to mentally deconstruct the frozen dinner and put cheese and tomato sauce on a piece of French bread myself.

@sheri1970--perhaps Sir Mix-A-Lot got his name 1990s because he made lots of breads, cakes and muffins and I misheard the lyrics to his most famous song all these years. Hey, he did also say he liked buns--hon--right?

The answer is clear--both of those books were published before Kenji was born!

Seriously, especially in older cookbooks proof-reading was much less rigorous, especially books like Christmas annuals which, regardless of the publishing house, may have been released in a slap-dash manner.

Those books were also published when it wasn't uncommon to see recipes published with instructions like "cook until done," because it was assumed that the reader or the cook had enough knowledge as to what 'done' was....

Finally, in very old cookbooks and recipes (like the 19th century) the equipment would vary so much from household to household (like the temperature of a fire or oven) that cooking times would be less useful than they are today.

In the first example, it probably just wasn't caught, and when it was they thought, "oh, the cook will know when it put it in anyway," and they didn't bother amending it.

@chiff--I wish I could send you some! It's funny, I never appreciated how much people long for Jersey tomatoes until I started reading food blogs and SE and realized how they were coveted all over the place. They say you don't miss something until you haven't got it...you do have a longer growing season in the south, though...

Even if roadside markets aren't worth 'traveling to,' necessarily, it's nice to see people sell their wares even if they aren't really gardeners by trade!

@chiff--I LOVE that sign--Farmer's Market, Tai Chi, and church services!

There are lots of roadside farm stands like that in Jersey--you see hand-painted signs that say "Jersey Tomatoes: 99 cents a pound." Tomatoes. Corn. Maybe some zucchini. That's it. In the fall they switch to pumpkins and mums.

I live about 20 minutes, tops, from this place and have never visited it!

Jersey Shore represent! @pizzasnob--you're so right that Jersey Shore pizza deserves its own 'regional pizza' category--Pete and Elda's offers the classic example of the matzoh-think crust in the shore area.

I suppose I'm the weirdo or the exception, because I'm Wegmans all the way: I can't recall the last time I bought a store brand, when the cheaper, just as (if not better) Wegmans version was available.

I swear I don't work for them, even though it seems like I'm always posting about my Wegmans' love!

@carol--haha! Thank goodness we didn't know one another when we were 12, though--I think more girls 'like me' plus the squash would have been more than my mother could have endured! I know you garden and would get a kick out of that story--I have to admit, although I love squash now, I'd be a bit hesitant to plant it....

@janaatwg--the red streaks were actually supposed to be blonde originally...not only was my hair over-processed, but I wasn't that good at dying it!